I keep getting asked, why can't the Kanban board be electonic? "That's more flexible" they say, but what I think they mean is "we feel funny having to stand-up, write stickies, and paste them onto the wall". Since most information management tools today are electronic (excluding, perhaps, only meeting notepads), it's natural to assume that electronic Kanban board is more practical.
However, the physical nature of the board is designed to address the shortcommings inherent into electronic todo lists and status tracking systems:
1) With electronic lists, sooner or later somebody will create another list, for the stuff that "doesn't really belong on the main one". This may immediately kill the Kanban idea of prioritizing all work items against each other and visualizing all work in progress. With physical board, there's only one place the items are tracked on: the board. The burden of creating another physical board is high enough to prevent accidental proliferation. You could say that the physical board does not stop people from creating electronic todo lists. That is true, but their transient nature will make them so obviously secondary that primary status of the board will not be doubted. At the end of the day, we may still have to mandate the use of the single tool, whether physical or electronic, for all prioritization and tracking activities.
2) Electronic todo list, or a work item tracking system, has unlimited space, which means creation of too many pending items is not as discouraged as is the case with the limited physical space of the board. Limited space models limited capacity. When bottlenecks caused by limited capacity are not visualized, nothing can stop proliferation of low-priority pending work items, most of which are never worked on, or spend most of their life time in waiting-to-be-gotten-to state. Truth be told, some of the tools, e.g. agilezen.com, help you solve this problem by allowing you to define limits on number of tasks in each state.
3) With electonic todo lists, as with other digital tools, people spend most of their time alone, sitting at their desks, staring at the monitor. Planning and prioritization-related communication is, effectively, discouraged, since it's either done via the limited media of the email, or requires scheduling team meetings. With physical board, the team members will find themselves having to go to the board, which encourages spontaneous face-to-face communication. Hell, you may even meet other people there, either talking about the same planning/prioritization problem (after all, it's the same queue), or being able to give you a hint on yours. The only way this can be replicated in the e-world is by making it accessible only via some kind of giant touch screen. But that defeats the purpose of having the board be digital in the first place. Also, why pay thousands for what you may get for free?
4) Finally, with electronic lists, once the status is discussed, and prioritization decisions are made, people have to go back and spend more time to update their items, only to loose some details,or to find that some of the other pressing priorities were left out of the conversation. With physical board, the stickes are moved around, or added, as people speak, for immediate status update. Again, with electronic list this could be solved by having the manager update the status and shuffle the items around during the meeting, but this is not very scalable and quickly gets out of hand in practice.
To summarize, today there are tens, if not hundreds, products out there simulating Kanban board in electronic form (see agilezen.com for just one example). Some of them help you solve problem #2 above. But do you really want to pay money for the system that replaces the warmth (and effectiveness) of live conversation with lonely clicking of the mouse? I hope not!
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